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Thursday, March 17, 2011

Glorious Sun!

It was 58 degrees here yesterday as I drove home from work (jumpy claps!!). Having felt not great in the morning I had a one hour run to do after work. This turned out to be really lucky because the morning had been cold and rainy and with the time change on the weekend it's so damn DARK again at 6 a.m. As I drove home from work and the sun was out and it felt suspiciously like springtime I was really excited about getting to run in the fantastic weather. I was a little perplexed however trying to decide on what to wear. It's been so many months of multiple layers that it seemed impossible that I might just need running tights and a shirt. Would I still need my polar fleece headband? Gloves? No and no!

The plan was to warm up easy for 20 minutes then do 6 x 2 minutes HARD with 3 minutes of easy jogging in between. The remainder was an easy jog to cool down. I was a little concerned about how this would go because I had not had a stellar eating day and still wasn't feeling so hot. I needed to get this run in though and I WAS NOT wasting this weather. So, I headed out in my compression tights and long sleeve running shirt and hoped for the best. Within the first ten minutes of the warm up I could feel pain in my left shin and right calf - hmmm, wonky gait much? Fortunately, by the end of the warm up that had worked itself out and I was feeling pretty good.

Once the warm up was over it was time to do the first 2 minute interval. 2 minutes is a long frickin time when you're running hard. I had programmed the workout into my watch because I didn't want to have to keep looking at it. This meant that the beeps were my cues. I have to admit that about 90 seconds into the first interval I had to look because I seriously thought I had boobed something up and not set it properly. Nope, it was counting down. Turned out that 2 minutes is just really long when you're running hard. This was followed by the 3 minutes of recovery which I was happy to see was way more than enough time. I'm recovering way faster from the hard efforts. Interestingly these 3 minute rest intervals went by way faster.

Overall this ended up being a fantastic run for me. The weather was awesome - I was actually a little warm in my long sleeve top, and I had a great run. By the end of the hour my legs were feeling pretty tired and my knees were a little sore but it was that good kind of tired that reminds you of the great work you've done. I ran 8.96km for an average pace of 6:47/km. That is really good for me! I have to admit, had I been keeping an eye on my watch I probably would have tried to bust it out a bit quicker during the cool down to hit that 9k. Not sure that's the point though! In any event this made me so excited for the nicer weather. Bring it on sun!